/me sighs, wonders why he bothers, sticks foot in mouth...
Exophase said:
You've got to be kidding me. All of the waiting will be for nothing if your Pandora doesn't have a silkscreen, a relatively minor aesthetic feature? Talk about blowing the ordeal out of proportion.
It would certainly make me feel worse about the wait... there's been more trivial things creating delays than this, so why this?
Exophase said:
You say not to listen to the "loud minority", but all of this is just you speaking for yourself. Unless you can SHOW that your opinion isn't itself the minority one then you have to step aside and accept what evidence actually exists. There have been a lot of mentions of these silent offboard/lurking majority and it's entirely too convenient that their desires always seem to represent those of the one invoking them.
Yeah, you're right. I shouldn't have said that. The way you're picking apart my post, taking every detail for it's most ABSOLUTE possible meaning, I can't say I wouldn't do the same. I just didn't mean it that way and I definitely wasn't trying to invoke the mythical silent majority for my own desires... I was simply pointing that out... because it's true, of ANY argument, that there is a silent majority out there. Notice that was a new paragraph, with a new topic sentence, not directly related to my agenda and only there to provoke some critical thinking.
The silent majority that I was referring to was for a more broad topic, the topic of rushing these final steps vs polish. I've noticed that in the past months, more and more people have been increasingly active in the forums who are only there to put pressure on the devs to "hurry up already". There's probably about 50-150 of these people who are constantly moaning at every revision and delay, and maybe around that same number of people who are active on the boards who DON'T complain. But all these people on the forum, they only add up to a small portion of the 4000 orders... MAYBE 10% of the people who ordered a Pandora come on here and post... MAYBE... but I'll bet it's less.
So these remaining 3500 people... how do THEY feel about this? THEY are the silent majority to which I refer. To be fair, we've gotta give both sides of the argument equal representation here and figure that they get 1750 people each.
Exophase said:
You could argue that someone not prepared to give up a silkscreen is someone who didn't understand what they were getting themselves into as well. Of course, that's all meaningless, because there's no objective sense of what this all "is about." No, I don't think it's reasonable to ship without a silkscreen, but I also don't think it was reasonable for shipping to be delayed 1.5 years.
Touché... but, you could argue that someone not expecting a project like this to take 3 years doesn't have experience in the manufacturing industry.
I don't think very many people did, and I don't fault you for it... I mean, neither did the Open Pandora Team right? As someone who has worked in manufacturing for years, at a company where we do almost everything in-house, I will be amazed if this device comes out in 2 months (from now).
I guess I should specify what I mean by "almost everything in house". I mean we only outsource 2 things: injection molded cases and printed circuit boards. Sound familiar? Yeah. Additionally, our entire workforce is in one building... that means from beginning to end, the product is being manufactured under tight control... from R&D, planning, engineering, prototyping, manufacturing, testing, final assembly, final testing, and shipping... all under one roof. We have 4 pick-and-place machines for surface mount components and two for through-hole. I'm sure we have all the exact equipment that plant in Texas has, plus more maybe. It's all standard equipment that pretty much every small manufacturing plant uses, I can just guess based off of what MW and ED have said about the Texas plant that the equipment there will be the same as what everyone else uses.
At my company... where ALL of what the OP team is trying to accomplish (obviously different products tho) is happening under one roof, with a PAID workforce of about 120 people, and WITHOUT international barriers to hinder communication or add delays from shipping between devs or waiting on email responses to come to a consensus, products STILL take a couple years to fully come to fruition. So I entered into this project KNOWING that the Open Pandora Team had NO CLUE what they were getting themselves into, time wise.
Two months?!??!! PSH!! Yeah right they should said two YEARS from the beginning... if only they had known what it's REALLY like to bring a product all the way from concept to market. If only they had known then they could have said two years in the beginning and then they would have been under a LOT less stress right now... poor guys. Then when it came out after 1 year 11 months they could have been thrilled that it was early =D
Exophase said:
A few weeks (or months?) might be proportionally small compared to the amount of delay thus far, but each upset is wearing down a userbase that is approaching their limits. With a lot of "almost theres" and "small" delays taking much longer than expected it's a hard psychological blow for people to endure one they don't really have to, and one coming when things are this "close" certainly doesn't make it easier.
Regarding user base wearing down... see above about the silent majority. Sure, a loudly complaining portion are wearing down... but are the rest of us?
Exophase said:
Maybe officially Open Pandora shouldn't compromise on design, but if they want to go with majority desire on this one then that's probably going to be to shelve the silkscreen and save as much face as possible on release time.
To quote a wise person here, unless you can SHOW that your opinion isn't itself the minority one then you have to step aside and accept what evidence actually exists.
aaah... right?
*lando-thums-up*
To ME, the evidence points at a hundred or so people who want things rushed, and thus are loudly complaining about it on the forums... but that doesn't prove anything about what the silent majority actually want.